The Ministry of National Education informs that, in order to include children aged between 3 and 6 years in preschool education, the following steps will take place, successively, in each educational unit:

• re-enrollment of children attending kindergarten this school year who wish to attend in the 2018-2019 school year as well - will begin on May 7;
• enrollment of new children will take place starting May 21.

The schedule for re-enrollments and enrollments will be set by the management of the educational unit and will be posted, in a visible place, in each kindergarten for the information of parents and interested public, including on its website (if available), and possibly on the websites of the school inspectorates.

Filling the available seats, after the completion of the re-enrollment process, will generally be done in descending order of age groups, as follows: upper group (5-year-old children), middle group (4-year-old children), and lower group (3-year-old children). Based on Government Decision no. 1.252/2012 and within the available places, children aged between 2 and 3 years may also be enrolled in the lower group.

If, in an educational unit, the number of enrollment applications exceeds the number of available seats, general separation criteria and specific separation criteria will be applied successively.

The general separation criteria are as follows:

• the existence of a document proving that a child is orphaned by both parents (the situation of a child coming from an orphanage/a placement center/foster care is assimilated to the situation of a child orphaned by both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is orphaned by one parent;
• the existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational unit;
• the existence of a medical certificate attesting the degree of disability of the child.

The specific separation criteria (drawn up by each preschool educational unit, approved by its Board of Administration and endorsed by the County/Bucharest School Inspectorate by May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-enrollment lists. Also, the specific separation criteria will only be applied after the general criteria have been exhausted.

To ensure the transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the managements of the preschool educational units will visibly display, for all interested, the following information:

• the institution's capacity (number of children for which it was designed);
• number of places approved by the schooling plan for the 2018-2019 school year (by age groups: lower, middle, upper);
• general and specific criteria for children's enrollment;
• number of children re-enrolled/enrolled daily (during the established period) out of the total available.

We mention that private preschool educational units are also obliged to display in a visible place information regarding their status, namely if they are authorized to operate provisionally or are accredited by the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-university Education (ARACIP).